Mikela’s Story

Most anyone who reads this blog knows that I am married to the_most_amazing woman! Mikela is truly a saint in every way. She’s a stay-at-home mom to our 3 kids and also works part-time at Trader Joes, all while trying to conquer the world of Children’s Book Illustration in her free time. She’s the most talented artist I’ve ever known and I’m seriously blessed to call her my wife. Last week, we had the opportunity to interview Mikela and she shared a small part of her life as an artist and her battle with Rheumatoid Arthritis. I was a wreck watching this play in our services at CCV…

Red Letters

We just kicked off our Summer series at CCV, entitled: Red Letters.  This is a 9-week series that will walk through parables of Jesus.  When we began to brainstorm ideas for this series we talked about several different ideas. We landed on the a “vintage typewriter” look for a couple different reasons.  More than just how cool the typewriter looks, we wanted to communicate the origin of the “red letters” concept – highlighting the words of Jesus with the red typewriter ink.

We picked up this beauty of a typewriter on EBay for $60 and used it for the primary photograph in the artwork.

And here is the final key art:

You’ll notice that the in the final key art, you can see much more of the inside of the typewriter.  After several attempts to get a good picture to work with, I ended up flipping the cover up on the typewriter and revealing the beautiful insides of it.  The frame around the top part of the artwork is actually the bottom side of the cover.  I really liked how this ended up framing out the artwork and making it look like the typewriter was typing on “bible size” pages.

The final step in the process was creating a sermon bumper to be used in the weekend services.  Our creative team came up with the idea to keep the feel of the bumper a little more dark and intense.  I found the perfect music bed and communicated the vision for the bumper to our video team.  Ovi did a phenominal job on the edit and really capturing the vision for this project. Here it is:

Dialogue on Facebook.

There are many of you in Church Communications who have been tasked with running your church’s Facebook page.  With that in mind, I wanted to share a few things that I’ve learned while running the Facebook page for CCV over the last 2 years.  Here are a couple of tips:

1. Find a rhythm in your posts. The key here is getting your church in the Newsfeed of your fans on a consistent and regular basis. Be consistent and strategic in your timing.  When you find a natural rhythm, your people will begin to feel comfortable interacting with you and your page.

2. Don’t JUST promote your church events and activities. If you want dialogue you have to appear to not be so selfish. Ask pop-culture questions. “Are you watching American Idol? – Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?” — These kinds of questions are not at all related to the church but it starts AND keeps the dialogue going. Don’t be afraid to embrace culture on your Facebook page – I guarantee you people will respond.

3. Use Media! People love pictures and videos. Find a volunteer in your church to take some high quality pictures on the weekend – capture the faces and activity of your church and get them up on your FB page- people will comment AND share. Video is just as powerful. Pull a 1 minute clip from last week’s sermon and get it up on your Facebook page on Monday morning. Ask a question that relates to the clip. If there’s a special song performed, get a video of it up on Facebook so that people can share it with their friends.  This is also a fantastic way for people to share bits about your church with their friends.  It’s the most powerful example of multi-level marketing at the click of a button.

4. RESPOND. If someone comments on one of your posts – you absolutely HAVE to respond. People need to know that your page is active and alive. Every reply, post or comment on your wall deserves a response from you. There’s nothing like a dead and unresponsive Facebook page to kill dialogue and interaction. If you want dialogue, you have to participate in it as well.

5. Be Strategic. Our team meets every Monday morning to talk about what we’re going to put on Facebook for the coming week. We talk through events to promote, what’s going in culture that we can talk about, what clip from the sermon we can pull and we literally map out our week of Facebook posts so that we’re consistent and strategic. It’s not random – it’s intentional.

These are just a few of the things we’ve learned with our Facebook page and I hope it helps!!

The Christmas Story

Check out the incredible video that our team created for Christmas this year. My wife, Mikela, created the artwork here and I’m so proud of her!

« Previous Entries